Saturday, March 31, 2012

AWOL has been experiencing some difficulties with its feed since Wednesday. I'm working on it. Apologies for any inconvenience.

-CJ-

Update 30 March 2012. The feed worked on Friday, and was delivered to subscribers via Feedburner. Those interested to see what they may have missed in the last few days can go directly to AWOL and scroll back through this week's additions.

There are
half-a-dozen ancient manuscripts which are the foundation of our
understanding of the text of the New Testament writings. Among these
stands the copy known since the sixteenth century as Codex Bezae
Cantabrigiensis. Any manuscript which has survived from antiquity is a
marvel for this reason alone, and as we explore its pages, we have a
rare opportunity to explore a little of the written culture of late
antique Christianity. Although in the past century some remarkable
papyrus manuscripts have been recovered from the sands of Egypt, their
discovery has in general served more to highlight the significance of
the parchment manuscripts than to diminish it.

Among
this group, Codex Bezae occupies a unique place for several reasons. In
the first place, as a bilingual manuscript, with a Greek text and a
Latin version on facing pages, it provides a valuable insight into the
reception of the Gospels and Acts in the western Christian tradition.
The Latin version it contains is one of the small handful of manuscripts
which are the most important witnesses to the development of a Latin
version before Jerome's famous Vulgate of 382. Secondly, it provides a
strikingly different form of text to that preserved in almost every
other manuscript, and to the printed Greek text and the translations
derived from it. These differences consist in the Gospels in frequent
harmonisation of the text and in Acts in a free restyling of the text
found best represented by Codex Vaticanus and reproduced in English
translations...

Thursday, March 29, 2012

We are pleased to announce the first results of a digitization collaboration between the Museo di Antichità di Torino (MAT, Superintendance of Archaeology in Turin) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-supported research project "Creating a Sustainable Digital Cuneiform Library (CSDCL)," under the general direction of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI - Los Angeles/Berlin).

Continuing the international collaboration dedicated to the digital capture, persistent archiving and web dissemination of major cuneiform collections in Europe and the Middle East, Laura Hawkins (Oxford University) and Bertrand Lafont (CNRS-Paris) were given access to the full cuneiform collection that is now kept in the MAT, consisting of approximately 800 tablets. With the generous support of the director of the Museo di Antichità, Gabriella Pantò and with the kind assistance of the staff, Hawkins and Lafont proceeded in September and October 2011 to scan the entire collection, including an existing archive of quite professionally done analogue photos; following post-capture processing of the raw images in Los Angeles, new image files have been posted to the CDLI website, and can be viewed directly through the project's search page or, with introductory text in English and Italian, at the MAT page. The initial phase of file postings included a set of images of obverse and reverse surfaces of nearly all objects that were created by the former Senior Curator of the collection, Giovanni Bergamini, listed in CDLI's MAT pages as detail shots; a second posting phase makes available the full CDLI fatcross renditions of text artifacts created in raw format by Hawkins and Lafont in Turin.

We hope that the MAT/CDLI web content will assist cuneiform specialists in the collation of existing publications (above all Archi-Pomponio, TCND [1990]; Archi-Pomponio-Bergamini, TCNU [1995]; and Archi-Pomponio-Stol, TCVC [1999]), and we are convinced that at the same time general access to images of all text-artifacts in curatorial and scholarly care, in conjunction with collated transliterations, will establish the broadest possible foundation for integrative research on all cuneiform inscriptions by the scholarly community.

- The look of the website has changed, and some bugs have been fixed. - 3708 new texts have been added to the catalogue, 653 of them in transliteration. - Thousands of transliterations have been revised. - 150,000 bibliographical references have been checked. The kind of edition is now specified, indicating whether it provides handcopy (H), transliteration (T), translation (Ts), or pictures (P) of the text. - A list of abbreviations has been added to the bibliography section. - Transliterations, revision of transliterations, handcopies and photos are always credited. - A tool for sending suggestions or corrections has been added.

Texts from most recent publications (CUSAS 6, Fs. Hrushka) will be added very soon.

All this work has been made with the collaboration of Palmiro Notizia and Jonatan Ortiz Salas (programmer).

Monday, March 26, 2012

We’re very pleased to announce the publication of a significant
portion of the Kenan Tepe excavations. Excavations at Kenan Tepe,
directed by Bradley Parker
(University of Utah) and co-directed by Lynn Swartz Dodd (University of
Southern California), represent part of the investigations of
the Upper Tigris Archaeological Research Project (UTARP). UTARP
organized major excavation and survey programs aimed at defining
archaeological correlates of ancient imperialism, colonialism and
culture contact in an area that was, for much of Mesopotamian history, a
frontier zone between the centralized states of Mesopotamia and the
much less centralized cultures of its Anatolian periphery.

This initial release of Kenan Tepe data in Open Context represents
the first installment of data and includes all Area F records where
UTARP team members excavated twenty-two trenches of various sizes and
depths in an effort to illuminate remains dating to the Late
Chalcolithic period and Early Bronze Age at the site. Excavation records
from further areas will be added in the near future to Open context and
will be followed by the print publication of several final report
volumes in the next few years.

UTARP’s Area F data from Kenan Tepe can be accessed at the Alexandria Archive Institute’s Open Context website.

Because the UTARP team had excellent data management, it was possible
to more fully use many of Open Context’s features not commonly used in
other projects. Archaeological documentation draws upon diverse
structured data (esp. tabular data), less structured texts (diaries,
journals), and media (drawings, photos, and other media types). The
UTARP team kept excellent records and had very clear file-naming
conventions that allowed us to link all of these different types of
documentation together. This makes it easier to organize and navigate
this large body of content. For example, one can follow links from
top-plans to see day-to-day progress in excavation. See this example.

State of Minnesota, Department of Natural Resources,
Division of Parks and Recreation, Minnesota State Parks Cultural
Resource Management Program staff,
State of Minnesota, Department of Natural Resources, Division of
Parks and Recreation

SAFE is pleased to announce the relaunch of our web site (still
http://savingantiquities.org) and blog, now fully integrated as part of
the site. All the posts (and corresponding comments) have transferred to
this new site at http://savingantiquities.org/blog/.
Our web site has a new look, but the more important goal with this
relaunch is to provide an easier user experience by bringing nearly 200
pages of content more upfront and visible. To present an easier platform
for your participation many of the new pages have an area for comments.
Frequent visitors to the previous site (that we launched in July 2003)
will notice a reorganization of the material, addition of graphics,
interactive tools, and easier access to our ever-growing social media
presence. Blog posts are now put into categories. Take a tour of our new
resources section
where items can now be searched by topic, region and date. The news
section on the home page has up-to-the-minute reports, and polls are now
on their own separate page.
These are a few of the new features; please peruse the site to make
your own discoveries.
Every piece of content has been reconsidered and displayed in a new way
with these goals in mind; but if we missed anything please let us know.
We think that our new site is an improvement, but it is your opinion ...(More ...)

The objective of the magazine is to offer a wide range of relevant subjects to its readers. The magazine will appear once every two months and will offer news, events, reviews, conference announcements, scientific articles on the latest technology and research, dissemination of current projects, case studies, international projects and many other subjects yet to come.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.